For 12 Years, There’s Been a Gap in One of Austin’s Most Famous Murals

If you’ve ever walked past the Wells Fargo on the Drag at 24th and Guadalupe, you may have noticed a mural on the exterior wall. It’s a celebration of the building’s history as one of Austin’s oldest cinemas. In that mural there’s a series of 12 images, 35mm frames from famous movies blown up to gigantic size. And then there’s one blank frame. Now there’s an initiative to fill that space with an image celebrating one of the defining Austin movies, and to immortalize one of its stars.

Built by the Dallas-based Interstate Theatre Circuit, the Varsity Theatre opened Nov. 20, 1936, with a showing of The Texas Rangers. Unlike many of the era’s picture palaces, the Varsity survived the arrival of television, and by 1979 it was specializing in repertory and second-run features. That’s when the owners commissioned local artist Carlos Lowry to paint the south-facing wall with a giant mural.

What he created for 2402 Guadalupe was vibrant and surrealist homage to cinema. Lighting crews on a gantry illuminated Antoine Doinel walking across the beach in The 400 Blows. Clowns from Fellini’s 8½ played before a painting of the Varsity’s own front doors, with poster-sized images of Bogart, Garbo, and Monroe beneath a marquee for The Seventh Seal. To their right, stunt legend Harold Lloyd hung from a drainpipe below the fire escape on which stood an Oscar ceremony’s worth of stars from Liza Minnelli to Toshiro Mifune. And, suspended in midair like a leviathan of cool – a giant Jimmy Cliff in his iconic “guns out” pose from The Harder They Come.

But it was best known for the series of stills: Instantly recognizable images from universally acknowledged classics – Battleship Potemkin, The General, Citizen Kane, Little Women, North by Northwest, Giant, and 2001: A Space Odyssey – drifted across the wall with movies familiar to the burgeoning cineaste community, like À bout de souffle, Sounder, Lucía, Norma Rae, and The American Friend. Yet the relative obscurity of some of those titles was absolutely the point: Lowry wanted to reflect the tastes of the UT community at that time.

However, the Varsity couldn’t last forever. In 1990, Tower Records took over the building, and faced immediate outcry over plans to paint over Lowry’s work. So the mural survived Tower, and then Follett’s Intellectual Property bookstore as a tenant. Still, there were changes: After a major restoration removed the fire escape and drainpipe, the dangling Lloyd shifted to hang off the Sounder frame, and the row of celebrities was given a wooden stage to stand on, rather than drifting in midair.

However, the biggest change came in 2011, when local architect Michael Antenora was hired to turn the empty storefront into restaurants and office space. While the building was – and still is – actually owned by Virginia-based Varsity Corner LLC, he was contracted by the main tenant, Wes Colwell of Qdoba Mexican Grill, who wanted the mural restored. However, due to ground-level structural alterations, changes had to be made and so he hired Greg Keshishian of Ion Art Inc. “We moved the whole thing up,” Antenora said. “They literally traced everything and painted it higher up the building.”

Not quite everything. The repositioning meant the loss of the painting of the Varsity’s frontage. That left a hole where The Seventh Seal‘s dancers once frolicked, and that’s where the empty 13th frame was placed. The idea, according to Antenora, was to emulate Lowry again, and ask students what they wanted to fill the space. He expected a contemporary classic like The Matrix, “so the current students at UT could go, ‘Oh, this movie means something for us.'” However, a Facebook survey yielded weak responses, and so the frame has remained empty for over a decade.

Until now. Austinites Paul Minor and Suzee Brooks have proposed filling the space with a still from Richard Linklater’s Austin-made classic, Slacker – and more specifically, one of the late Teresa Taylor, aka Butthole Surfers drummer Teresa Nervosa, in her role as Pap Smear Pusher. Her scene, in which she interrupts a conversation between Ultimate Loser (Scott Marcus) and Stephanie From Dallas (Stella Weir) in an attempt to sell them what she claims is Madonna’s Pap smear, became globally ubiquitous as the main poster image, and familiar to many Austinites as part of the now-lost mural on the side of the former I Luv Video on Airport (painted over when it became Lazarus Brewing Co. last November). Now the plan is to use that scene to fill the empty 13th frame. Brooks explained, “Putting Slacker up there just feels like the perfect fit, like it’s been waiting to be.”

Brooks said Minor suggested the addition before Taylor died in June, but the process has been longer and more expensive than they initially expected. However, they now have a bid from creative consortium SprATX and have raised the roughly $9,000 required for the projection equipment, scissor lift rental, and permitting. Brooks said she’s been in contact with the property owners, as well as the building manager and its other main tenant, CVS, and is just waiting on final approval. “We’re pretty much ready to pull the trigger.”

The proposal also has the support of Linklater and indie cinema godfather John Pierson (see their conversation about Taylor at right), as well as Lowry and Antenora, who said, “Anything from Slacker is an excellent choice.”

For 12 Years, There’s Been a Gap in One of Austin’s Most Famous Murals

This article appears in August 4 • 2023.